MVC implementation lives on: Give a warm welcome to Eclipse Krazo

What do Eclipse Ozark and Eclipse Krazo have in common? If you take a closer look, you’ll see that the latter is Ozark spelled backward. But forget about Ozark, Eclipse Krazo is the new name for the reference implementation of MVC 1.0.

Project lead Ivar Grimstad announced the name change in late August. The actual news is not the name but the fact that the creation review for Eclipse Krazo was successful.

The goal of Eclipse Krazo is to provide an implementation for Model View Controller API (MVC 1.0), starting from the specification defined by Java Community Process JSR-371. The MVC API and TCK are being proposed as part of the Eclipse Project for MVC.

Krazo is currently licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Learn more about it here.

From Ozark to Krazo

It’s not easy to pick a name and this is no exception. Since the name Ozark is quite common, it wasn’t a very good fit for an Eclipse project name. So they asked for input on the Ozark developer mailing list and even wrote a small program which generated all permutations of ‘ozark’, Ivar Grimstad explained in his blog post.

They filtered, discussed, voted and ended up with Ozark spelled backward: Krazo. So the reference implementation of MVC 1.0 is now called Eclipse Krazo.

What is Eclipse Krazo all about?

In mid-September, we talked to Christian Kaltepoth as part of our “Understanding Jakarta EE” series. Although the name has changed, the meaning has stayed the same so let’s have a look at what he had to say about the project that’s now called Eclipse Krazo.

Ozark is the reference implementation of JSR 371, the Model View Controller specification that was originally intended to be a lightweight alternative to JavaServer Faces for Java EE 8. Unfortunately, Oracle had shifted its priorities at the last moment and MVC 1.0 did not make it into Java EE 8.

Fortunately, Oracle had made it possible for the community to push the specification further. MVC 1.0 is finally nearing completion. In a way, you could say that MVC 1.0 was the first specification that Oracle gave to the community and it’s now continued very openly.

We think that MVC 1.0 (just like the other components of Java EE) will be very well taken care of by the Eclipse Foundation; therefore, we are striving to further develop MVC as a separate subproject of EE4J. Ozark is a very central part of the specification as a reference implementation. This is why we decided to transfer Ozark to the Eclipse Foundation as a first step.

What does the future hold for Eclipse Ozark?

First, we plan to complete the transfer to the Eclipse Foundation. Unfortunately, this is not as easy as it sounds. New Eclipse projects have to go through a whole series of phases to check a number of legal requirements. For example, the intellectual property of the source code, the license of the project and the dependencies, potential conflicts between the project name and existing trademarks, and much more. It turned out that the name Ozark could be problematic, so we also need a new name for the reference implementation. These issues are currently being clarified. However, we hope that the transfer will be completed soon.

Independently of this, of course, the project is also being actively worked on. Apart from implementing other changes to the specifications, Ozark still needs to assess compatibility with different Java EE servers. Currently, Ozark works very well with GlassFish, WildFly, and Payara. Support for Apache TomEE and WebSphere Liberty is still under development.